Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

“Just a few minutes,” he said.

Chrissy said, “It sounds reasonable, Jack. You know it does.”

Her husband made a show of settling back down on the couch, not quite hiding the triumph in his eyes. “You want it to sound reasonable so you’re not embarrassed. That’s why. Okay, photo man. Go ahead. You’ve got five minutes.”

Clay stepped away from the couch, headed back over to his photo gear. “Five minutes it is,” he said. “Just lie back and keep your eyes closed.”

Chrissy then said something low and sharp to her husband, and he replied, and she said, “Hunh, we’ll see about that!”

Clay squatted down on the floor, let his fingers rummage through his toolbox. Another flare of light as the thunderstorm approached. He had tried. Honest he had, from setting up the legit business to going on the straight and narrow, never letting anything get away from him.

But they had pushed and prodded him, right from the moment he had arrived. They had asked him. Customer’s choice, he thought. Not my fault.

There. He found what he was looking for. He stood up.

“Here I come,” he said, and as he walked over to them he held the hunting knife close to his thigh, letting a thumb lovingly and caressingly go over the sharp blade.

The Gooseberry Fool by James Powell

Readers who enjoyed James Powell’s April 1999 story “Jerrold’s Meat” will he pleased to learn that the tale is currently nominated for Canada’s most prestigious mystery prize, the Arthur Ellis Award. Mr. Powell has ten (yes, ten!) previous nominations for the Arthur Ellis. This year’s winner will be announced in Toronto at the end of May (just a few days from this writing). May this he your year, Jim!

* * *

In the early 1880s Europe was visited each year by a plague of assassinations at the hands of the same hired killer. The Continent’s prefects of police christened this man the Gooseberry Fool because his annual itinerary approximated that of the hero in Andre Jurry’s incomparable operetta of the same name.

Jurry’s music told the legend of a nobleman from a northern clime whose passion for gooseberries sent him rattling southward in his carriage as soon as the roads were passable, startling crocuses from the ground and gilding willows along the way as if he were spring itself. Down the Danube valley, down the Adriatic coast to the very heel of the Italian boot he rolled and then was ferried, carriage and all, across to Corfu where Europe’s first gooseberries hung ripe on the bush. Through spring and summer, the nobleman followed the maturing fruit northward in easy stages up into France and Germany, with a final cold, autumnal rush across the gooseberry fields of East Prussia.

But even though the police knew the which-way and the when — MURDER BY RAILROAD SCHEDULE, the newspapers called it — such was the Gooseberry Fool’s skill and mastery of disguise that they could no more prevent his first assassination than stop the arrival of the first robin of the year. The hired killer came with a full order book and claimed his victims until the foliage turned.

Customarily, the police would have sought help from the fearsome Ambrose Ganelon, founder of San Sebastiano’s famous detective agency. But age had dimmed those fabled powers, while his son and namesake remained an untried cub, a tinkerer among test tubes and flammarion flasks.

On a Saturday morning in July, 1885, Ambrose Ganelon II emerged from 18 bis rue Blondin, the family residence and the offices of the Ganelon detective agency, carrying a small suitcase. More than just a taller version of the father, the son’s long legs, so becoming in his cavalry-officer days, now gave him a civilian elegance. Where the Founder, all scowl and armchair, brooded over cases like a python digesting a pig, until only the skeleton of truth remained, the son perambulated, preferring to talk things out on long walks about the city, his companions struggling to match his stride. At a later date, his elegance and tenacity would earn him the nickname, the Bouledogue des Boulevards.